Infinite Jest (190 page)

‘Of course I can’t say I’ve tossed the Canadian case’s file, I needn’t go that far
they say. That would expose me to conflict of interest—the
irony
—and could hurt Tooty, if my position’s threatened. I’ve been told I can simply let
him simmer on that until time passes and nothing moves forward.’ He raised his own
eyes. ‘Which means you cannot tell anyone either. Declining to prosecute for personal
spiritual reasons—the office—it would be hard for others to understand. This is why
I’ve come to you in explicit confidence.’

‘I hear your request and I’ll honor it.’

‘But listen. I can’t do it. Cannot. I’ve sat outside that hospital room saying the
Serenity Prayer over and over and praying for willingness and thinking of my own spiritual
interests and believing this amend is my Higher Power’s will for my own growth and
I haven’t been able to go in. I go and sit paralyzed outside the room for several
hours and drive home and pry Tooty away from the sink. It can’t go on. I have to look
that rotten—no,
evil,
I’m convinced in my heart, that son of a bitch is
evil
and
deserves
to be removed from the community. I have to walk in there and extend my hand and
tell him I’ve wished him ill and blamed him and ask for forgiveness—
him
—if you
knew
what
sick, twisted,
sadistically
evil
and
sick
thing he did to us, to her—and ask him for forgiveness. Whether he forgives or not
is not the issue. It’s my own side of the street I need to clean.’

‘It sounds very, very hard,’ Pat said.

The fine hat was almost spinning between the man’s calves, the pantcuffs of which
had been pulled up in the defecatory forward lean to reveal socks that weren’t, it
seemed, both quite the same texture of wool. The mismatched socks spoke to Pat’s heart
more than anything else.

‘I don’t even know why I came here,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t simply leave again and drive
home. Yesterday she’d been at her tongue with one of those old NoCoat LinguaScraper
appliances until it bled. I can’t go home and look on that again without having cleaned
house.’

‘I hear you.’

‘And you were just down the hill.’

‘I understand.’

‘I don’t expect help or counsel. I already believe I have to do it. I’ve accepted
the injunction to do it. I believe I have no choice. But I can’t do it. I haven’t
been able to do it.’

‘Willing, maybe.’

‘Haven’t yet been willing. Yet. I wish to emphasize
yet
.’

20 NOVEMBER
YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT
IMMEDIATELY PRE-FUNDRAISER-EXHIBITION-FÊTE
GAUDEAMUS IGITUR

Usually, part of the experience of having the place you live in throw a gala is watching
different people arrive for the festivities—the Warshavers, the Gartons and Peltasons
and Prines, the Chins, the Middlebrooks and Gelbs, an incidental Lowell, the Buckmans
in their claret-colored Volvo driven by their silent grown son who you never see except
when he’s driving Kirk and Binnie Buckman someplace. Dr. Hickle and his creepy niece.
The Chawafs and Heavens. The Reehagens. The palsied and megawealthy Mrs. Warshaver
with her pair of designer canes. The Donagan brothers from Svelte Nail. But usually
we never get to see them arriving, the friends and patrons of E.T.A., for the Fundraising
exhibition and gala. Usually while they’re arriving and getting greeted by Tavis we’re
all down in the lockers, dressing and stretching, getting ready to exhibit. Getting
shaved and taped by Loach, etc.

It must usually be an unusual occasion for the guests, too, because for the first
few hours they’re there to watch us play—they’re all audience—then at some point with
the last couple matches winding down the guys in white jackets with trays start appearing
in Comm.-Ad., and the gala starts, and then it’s the guests who become the participants
and performers.

Dressing and stretching, wrapping grips with Gauze-Tex or filling a pouch with fuller’s
earth (Coyle, Freer, Stice, Traub) or sawdust (Wagenknecht, Chu), getting taped, those
in puberty getting shaved and taped. A ritual. Even the conversation, usually, such
as it is, has a timeless ceremonial aspect. John Wayne hunched as always on the bench
before his locker with his towel like a hood over his head, running a coin back and
forth over the backs of his fingers. Shaw pinching the flesh between his thumb and
first finger, acupressure for a headache. Everyone had gone into their like autopilot
ritual. Possalthwaite’s sneakers were pigeon-toed under a stall door. Kahn was trying
to spin a tennis ball on his finger like a basketball. At the sink, Eliot Kornspan
was blowing out his sinuses with hot water; no one else was anywhere near the sink.
A certain number of hysterical pre-competition rumors about the Québec Jr. Team and
the severity of the weather circulated and were refuted and shifted antigens and returned.
You could hear the high-register end of the wind even down here. The Csikszentmihalyi
kid was doing a kind of piaffer in place, his knees hitting his chest, stretching
his hip-flexors out. Troeltsch sat up against his locker near Wayne, wearing a disconnected
headset and broadcasting his own match in advance. There were fart-accusations and
-denials. Rader snapped a towel at Wagenknecht, who liked to stand for long periods
of time bent at the waist with his head against his knees. Arslanian sat very still
in a corner, blindfolded in what was either an ascot or a very fey necktie, his head
cocked in the attitude of the blind. It was unclear whether B squads would even get
to play; no one was sure how many courts the M.I.T. Union had inside. Rumors flew
this way and that. Michael Pemulis was nowhere to be seen since early this
A.M.
, at which time Anton Doucette said he’d seen Pemulis quote ‘lurking’ out by the West
House dumpsters looking quote ‘anxiously depressed.’

Then a small but univocal cheer went up from some of the players when Otis P. Lord
appeared at the door, his cadaverous dad escorting him, O.P.L. out of post-op and
pale but looking his old self, with just a thin little choker-width bandage of gauze
around his neck from the monitor’s removal and an odd ellipse of dry red skin around
his mouth and nostrils. He came in and shook a few hands and used the stall next to
Postal Weight and left; he wasn’t playing today.

J. L. Struck was applying an astringent to areas of his jaw.

An hysterical rumor that the Québec players had been spotted coming down a ramp out
of a charter-bus in the main lot and were by all appearances not the Québec J.D.C.
and -W.C. squads but some sort of Special-Olympicish Québec adult
wheelchair
-tennis contingent—this rumor flew wildly around the locker room and then died out
when a couple of the sub-14’s who burned nervous energy by scampering around checking
rumors scampered out and up the stairs to check the rumor and failed to return.

Across the wall on the Female side we could easily hear Thode and Donni Stott invoking
Camilla, goddess of speed and light step. Thode had had an hysterical tantrum after
breakfast because Poutrincourt hadn’t showed for the Females’ pre-match Staff thing
and looked to be AWOL. Loach et al. had outfitted Ted Schacht with a complex knee-brace
with jointed aluminum struts down both sides and a coin-sized hole in the elastic
over the kneecap for dermal ventilation, and Schacht was lumbering around between
the stalls and the locker with his arms straight out and his weight on his heels pretending
to walk like Frankenstein. Several people talked to themselves at their lockers. Barry
Loach was down on one knee shaving Hal’s left ankle for tape. A couple of us remarked
how Hal wasn’t eating the usual customary Snickers bar or AminoPal. Hal had his hands
on Loach’s shoulders as the tape went on. A match-wrap is two horizontal layers just
above the malleolus knob-thing, then straight down and four times around the tarsus
just in front of the joint, so there’s a big gap for flexion of the joint, but a compacting
and supportive wrap. Then Loach puts a liner-sock and a wick-sock over the tape, then
slides on the little inflatable AirCast deal and pumps it to the right pressure, checking
with a little gauge, and Velcros it just tight enough for support plus max-flexion.
Hal was on the bench with his hands on Loach’s shoulders through the whole little
routine. Everybody’s had his hands on Loach’s shoulders at one time or another. Hal’s
shave and wrap take four minutes. Schacht’s knee and Fran Unwin’s hamstring thing
each take over ten. Wayne’s quarter looked like it was dancing on his knuckles. Because
of the towel over his head all you could see was a very thin oval section of his face,
like an almond on its end. Wayne got to have a small disk-player in his locker, and
Joni Mitchell was playing, which nobody ever minded because he kept it very low. Stice
was blowing a purple bubble. Freer was trying to touch his toes. Traub and Whale,
also on the wrap-bench, later said Hal was being weird. Like they said asking Loach
if the pre-match locker room ever gave him a weird feeling, occluded, electric, as
if all this had been done and said so many times before it made you feel it was recorded,
they all in here existed basically as Fourier Transforms of postures and little routines,
locked down and stored and call-uppable for rebroadcast at specified times. What Traub
heard as
Fourier Transforms
Whale heard as
Furrier Transforms
. But also, as a consequence, erasable, Hal had said. By whom? Hal before a match
usually had a wide-eyed ingenuish anxiety of someone who’d never been in a situation
even remotely like this before. His face today had assumed various expressions ranging
from distended hilarity to scrunched grimace, expressions that seemed unconnected
to anything that was going on. The word was that Tavis and Schtitt had chartered three
buses to take the squads to an indoor venue Mrs. Inc had had alumnus Corbett Th-Thorp
call in mammoth favors to arrange—several mostly unused courts somewhere in the deep-brain
tissue of the M.I.T. Student Union—and that the whole gala would be moved over to
the Student Union, and that the Québec team and most of the guests were being contacted
by cellular about the cancellation of the previous cancellation and the change in
venue, and that those guests who didn’t hear about the change would ride in the buses
with the players and staff, some of them in formal- and evening-wear, probably, the
guests. Traub also says he also heard Hal use the word
moribund,
but Whale couldn’t confirm. Schacht entered a stall and drove the latch home with
a certain purposeful sound that produced that momentary gunslinger-enters-saloon-type
hush throughout the locker room. Nobody in the vicinity could say they heard Barry
Loach respond one way or another to any of the strange moody things Hal was saying
as Loach locked down the ankle for high-level play. Wagenknecht apparently really
did fart.

The consensus among E.T.A.s is that Head Trainer Barry Loach resembles a wingless
fly—blunt and scuttly, etc. One E.T.A. tradition consists of Big Buddies recounting
to new or very young Little Buddies the saga of Loach and how he ended up as an elite
Head Trainer even though he doesn’t have an official degree in Training or whatever
from Boston College, which is where he’d gone to school. In outline form, the saga
goes that Loach grew up as the youngest child of an enormous Catholic family, the
parents of which were staunch Catholics of the old school of extremely staunch Catholicism,
and that Mrs. Loach (as in the mom)’s life’s most fervent wish was that one of her
countless children would enter the R.C. clergy, but that the eldest Loach boy had
done a two-year U.S.N. bit and had gotten de-mapped early on in the Brazilian O.N.A.N./U.N.
joint action of Y.T.M.P.; and that within weeks of the wake the next oldest Loach
boy had died of ciquatoxic food-poisoning eating tainted blackfin grouper; and the
next oldest Loach, Therese, through a series of adolescent misadventures had ended
up in Atlantic City NJ as one of the women in sequined leotards and high heels who
carries a large posterboard card with the Round # on it around the ring between rounds
of professional fights, so that hopes for Therese becoming a Carmelite dimmed considerably;
and on down the line, one Loach falling helplessly in love and marrying right out
of high school, another burning only to play the cymbals with a first-rate philharmonic
(now crashing away with the Houston P.O.). And so on, until there was just one other
Loach child and then Barry Loach, who was the youngest and also totally under Mrs.
L.’s thumb, emotionally; and that young Barry had breathed a huge sigh of relief when
his older brother—always a pious and contemplative and big-hearted kid, brimming over
with abstract love and an innate faith in the indwelling goodness of all men’s souls—began
to show evidence of a true spiritual calling to a life of service in the R.C. clergy,
and ultimately entered Jesuit seminary, removing an enormous weight from his younger
brother’s psyche because young Barry—ever since he first slapped a Band-Aid on an
X-Men figure—felt his true calling was not to the priesthood but to the liniment-and-adhesive
ministry of professional athletic training. Who, finally, can say the whys and whences
of each man’s true vocation? And then so Barry was a Training major or whatever at
B.C., and by all accounts proceeding satisfactorily toward a degree, when his older
brother, quite far along toward getting ordained or frocked or whatever as a licensed
Jesuit, suffered at age twenty-five a sudden and dire spiritual decline in which his
basic faith in the innate indwelling goodness of men like spontaneously combusted
and disappeared—and for no apparent or dramatic reason; it just seemed as if the brother
had suddenly contracted a black misanthropic spiritual outlook the way some twenty-five-year-old
men contract Sanger-Brown’s ataxia or M.S., a kind of degenerative Lou Gehrig’s Disease
of the spirit—and his interest in serving man and God-in-man and nurturing the indwelling
Christ in people through Jesuitical pursuits underwent an understandable nosedive,
and he began to do nothing but sit in his dormitory room at St. John’s Seminary—right
near Enfield Tennis Academy, coincidentally, on Foster Street in Brighton off Comm.
Ave., right by the Archdiocese H.Q. or whatever—sitting there trying to pitch playing-cards
into a wastebasket in the middle of the floor, not going to classes or vespers or
reading his Hours, and talking frankly about giving up the vocation altogether, which
all had Mrs. Loach just about prostrate with disappointment, and had young Barry suddenly
re-weighted with dread and anxiety, because if his brother bailed out of the clergy
it would be nearly irresistibly incumbent on Barry, the very last Loach, to give up
his true vocation of splints and flexion and enter seminary himself, to keep his staunch
and beloved Mom from dying of disappointment. And so a series of personal interviews
with the spiritually necrotic brother took place, Barry having to station himself
on the other side of the playing-cards’ wastebasket so as even to get the older brother’s
attention, trying to talk the brother down from the misanthropic spiritual ledge he
was on. The spiritually ill brother was fairly cynical about Barry Loach’s reasons
for trying to talk him down, seeing as how both men knew that Barry’s own career-dreams
were on the line here as well; though the brother smiled sardonically and said he’d
come to expect little better than self-interested #1-looking-out from human beings
anyway, since his practicum work out among the human flocks in some of Boston’s nastier
downtown venues—the impossibility of conditions-changing, the ingratitude of the low-life
homeless addicted and mentally ill flocks he served, and the utter lack of compassion
and basic help from the citizenry at large in all Jesuitical endeavors—had killed
whatever spark of inspired faith he’d had in the higher possibilities and perfectibility
of man; so he opined what should he expect but that his own little brother, no less
than the coldest commuter passing the outstretched hands of the homeless and needy
at Park Street Station, should be all-too-humanly concerned with nothing but the care
and feeding of Numero Uno. Since a basic absence of empathy and compassion and taking-the-risk-to-reach-out
seemed to him now an ineluctable part of the human character. Barry Loach was understandably
way out his depth on the theological turf of like Apologia and the redeemability of
man—though he was able to relieve a slight hitch in the brother’s toss that was stressing
his card-throwing arm’s flexor carpi ulnaris muscle and so to up the brother’s card-in-wastebasket
percentage significantly—but he was not only desperate to preserve his mother’s dream
and his own indirectly athletic ambitions at the same time, he was actually rather
a spiritually upbeat guy who just didn’t buy the brother’s sudden despair at the apparent
absence of compassion and warmth in God’s supposed self-mimetic and divine creation,
and he managed to engage the brother in some rather heated and high-level debates
on spirituality and the soul’s potential, not that much unlike Alyosha and Ivan’s
conversations in the good old
Brothers K.,
though probably not nearly as erudite and literary, and nothing from the older brother
even approaching the carcinogenic acerbity of Ivan’s Grand Inquisitor scenario.